What Mumbai Spirit?

Three hours after a bomb turned a bus stop in Dadar, in central Mumbai, into one of those ingenuously twisted metallic installations that the city’s minor sculptors so love, a murmuring crowd converged on a multiplex less than fifty metres away. What seemed to be the problem? “They’ve cancelled the 10 P.M. show of ‘Delhi Belly,’ ” a man in shorts with an angry demeanor explained. Surely no one had the stomach to watch the scatological sleeper hit on an evening on which three blasts in southern Mumbai had left eighteen people dead and about a hundred and thirty wounded? “These kinds of things happen all the time,” the man replied. “Why should we put our lives on hold just because there have been a few bomb blasts?”

The crowd seemed especially peeved that the 8 P.M. show had been allowed to proceed. The attendant at the counter was apologetic. “We’d already sold the tickets so we couldn’t call it off,” he apologized. The movie that had been screened: “Murder 2.”

The ennui of the movie fans was perhaps understandable. Since a muggy March day in 1993, when thirteen bombs went off down the city’s spine, killing two hundred and fifty-seven people, Mumbai has been the target of eight terror attacks of varying intensity. The most spectacular offensive against the city unfolded in November, 2008, when terrorists from Pakistan sailed into Mumbai in rubber dinghies and laid siege to two luxury hotels, a Jewish prayer hall, and one of the main train stations, leaving a hundred and sixty-six dead. Wednesday night’s attacks took fewer lives than most of the others over the past decade and barely disrupted life in a city that, like New York, boasts that it never sleeps. Even as the disappointed “Delhi Belly” fans trickled away, working-class bars and eateries right by the blast site were bubbling with clients. For them, as for so many other Mumbai residents, the latest set of explosions was just more of the same.

Twelve hours later, the morning rush hour rolled around and, except for a yellow cordon around the mangled bus stop and some shattered storefronts, there was little to indicate that a terror strike had occurred the evening before. Vegetable vendors did a brisk trade in spinach and sour limes, and hundreds of commuters streamed past on their way to the nearby train station. The city’s ability to pick itself up and march right back to work in this way has, after previous attacks, routinely been hailed by politicians and society leaders as evidence of the indomitable “spirit of Mumbai.” Thursday morning, that cliché was notably absent in the newspapers and on TV. In fact, for the first time, Mumbai citizens were expressing an antipathy towards that phrase. Perhaps they were finally mindful that politicians who had praised the spirit of Mumbai had used this presumed resilience as an excuse to absolve themselves of the need to take the difficult decisions necessary to actually make the city safer and more livable. Shortly after the blasts, a Bollywood music composer named Vishal Dadlani sent out a tweet that warned, “First person to suggest a candle-march gets a resounding slap. We need real changes, real measures. Not your stupid tokenism!”

It will, however, take much more than tweets and rousing text messages to effect real change. It suddenly became clear this morning that the sentiment many had identified as the Mumbai spirit was probably epic apathy all along. And, really, who could blame the residents of this city of just over twelve million for being too exhausted to think about anything other than their gruelling daily routines? Behind the sparkling Bollywood façade it projects to the world, Mumbai is a city riven with gargantuan problems. It’s more slum dog than millionaire. More than sixty per cent of the residents of India’s financial capital live in shanties, with twenty thousand people packed into each square kilometre. The pollution is often throat-searing; the water supply and road systems are overstretched. The trains, which carry about 6.9 million commuters every work day, are designed to transport seventeen hundred passengers each, but in peak hour bone-crunchingly pack in forty-five hundred travellers. Life in Mumbai is a daily battle that leaves little energy for luxuries, such as joining campaigns to pressure the administration to provide the basic amenities that residents of most cities take for granted.

Sometimes, it doesn’t even leave room for common sense. As soon as text messages carried news of the blasts through the city, crowds of office workers rushed to the railway stations to dash home, unmindful of the possibility that the trains could be a target of the bombers, too, just as they were in 2006. Though terror has become routine in Mumbai, the government has not mounted a public campaign to educate residents about what to do in the aftermath of an attack nor conducted regular drills to prepare them for tragedies that have now become all too commonplace.

Though the evening talk shows were filled with perfervid commentators berating the authorities for their inability to prevent these repeated attacks, it’s clear that the city is too sprawling and porous to seal off completely. No matter how many security cameras are installed and how many check posts are established at traffic junctions, it won’t be long before another determined terrorist hides an explosive device under an umbrella. Mumbai, it’s apparent, must now learn to live with terror. But its desire to head for the pictures minutes after an attack seems to demonstrate that the city has not only jettisoned its celebrated spirit, it’s also lost a small bit of its soul.